[Snowball-discuss] Name Convention and abstract Method "stem()"

From: Jens Krefeldt (J.Krefeldt@gmx.de)
Date: Sat Aug 20 2005 - 19:15:46 BST

Hi Snowball developers,

1. many thx for this nice piece of code.

2. I have an improvement suggestion for the JAVA Snowball Stemmer: If you
want to use a SnowballStemmer you have to prepare something like this:

            String name = ...;
            Class stemClass = Class.forName("org.tartarus.snowball.ext." +
name + "Stemmer");
            stemmer = (SnowballProgram) stemClass.newInstance();
            stemMethod = stemClass.getMethod("stem", new Class[0]);
            stemMethod.invoke(stemmer, null);

My Question: Why doesn't the SnowballProgram class has an abstract stem()
method like

public abstract class SnowballProgram {
...
    /**
     * Every derived <CODE>SnowballProgram</CODE> has to implement this
method
     * to initialize the appropiate stem algorithm.
     */
    public abstract boolean stem();

...
}

This will reduce the code shown above (and also makes it faster, reflection
is slow!):

            String name = ...;
            Class stemClass = Class.forName("org.tartarus.snowball.ext." +
name + "Stemmer");
            stemmer = (SnowballProgram) stemClass.newInstance();
            stemmer.stem();

This also the standard Design Pattern "Abstract Factory" [Gamma et al, 1996]
and implicitly used by JAVA.

3. I would suggest to rename the stemmer classes regarding to ISO country
(http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma/02iso-3166-code-lists/list-en1.html)
and language (http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/englangn.html) codes, so
that I can identify them via a java.util.Locale object, e.g.:

germanStemmer.java ==> de_DE.java or de_DE_Stemmer.java

Pls let me know what you think.

Best regards

Jens

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